Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-11-Speech-2-044"
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"en.20000411.3.2-044"2
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"Mr President, before I comment on Mrs Stauner’s report, I would like to endorse what has been said before, namely that the European Parliament is quite right to rap the European Commission over the knuckles and to at least postpone the discharge on the 1998 budget. It is quite ironic that this should happen at a time when a draft report by the European Court of Auditors is being circulated which shows that our Parliament has not exactly spent the taxpayers’ hard-earned money wisely either. In the light of this, it might be expedient to establish in all honesty at this stage that the reproaches which we are quite rightly hurling at the European Commission today might well be heading in our own direction tomorrow, again quite rightly. Indeed, if we are to believe the draft report, the groups deal with the many millions which are made available to them for God knows what reason in a very careless, even fraudulent manner, and the administrative department of this Parliament gets off anything but scot-free, to put it mildly.
This is just to add to the issues which have been dragging on for many years, such as the nonchalant way in which we deal with the expenses we are paid as MEPs, in principle with a view to recruiting personnel, or the way in which we handle the building policy of this Parliament, which is so strange as easily to prompt thoughts of large-scale fraud. In short, today we are quite rightly acting as the plaintiff, but we need to be very aware of the fact that, tomorrow, we will be in the dock ourselves. The fact that this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black should not, however, be any reason for tolerating deceit, fraud and further theft of taxpayers’ money and should not, especially, give certain people any excuse for tolerating these things. Nor should it be any reason or excuse for allowing those who have lined their pockets and taken advantage all these years to go unpunished.
I only wanted to make the remark because I am quite convinced that fraud and mismanagement are inherent and are causally linked to systems where there is no obvious connection between revenue and expenditure, between the levying of taxes, on the one hand, and the policies being financed with these taxes on the other. In my own country, for example, I know of projects which have been launched with so-called European money which would never have been accepted or requested by the people, if it they had known that their own tax money would be used for them. European money is always spent with less thought than tax money which has not made a detour through Europe. This is done under the motto: if we do not spend this European money, somebody else will. This may sound harsh or even simplistic, but that is how it is.
I have not even mentioned the overlap which exists in a large number of these European credits. National states provide development aid, so does Europe. National states combat racism, so does Europe. National states support the women’s movement, so does Europe. National states support the trade unions and parties, so does Europe. National states support all kinds of Third Way movements, so does Europe. And so on and so forth. Manna falls from heaven and nobody knows whether it is all spent wisely, or worse, we know for a fact that a great deal of that money is not spent wisely, but there are no complaints because, in the case of European money, a kind of pro-European goodwill is systematically bought from all kinds of pressure groups.
Returning to today’s topic, I would especially like to congratulate the rapporteur, Mrs Stauner, on her report. It is true that the explanatory note to the resolution reads much like a piece of crime fiction. It contains scandals which are now out in the open about waste, nepotism, theft, the Fléchard affair, the ECHO affair and such like, not to mention the direct involvement of Commissioner Cresson. There is no need to keep on about what is stated quite clearly in black and white in this report. I would only like to add that I, as representative of hundreds of thousands of tax payers, am shocked to find that the present Commission too is manoeuvring in all kinds of directions and making all kinds of attempts to protect a number of people responsible for this mismanagement. I think that we need to do some straight talking to the Commission and that we may have to penalise their persistent bad conduct with a new crisis of confidence after 15 May, if necessary by means of a motion of no confidence, because desperate situations call for desperate measures."@en1
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